News Highlights

Some drinkers believe 'getting tanked' is acceptable

Tipsy young people moving from bar to bar in downtown Mankato have prompted university and community officials to seek new ways top reduce risky drinking.

2008-01-23
By Dan Nienaber, Free Press Staff Writer [first in a series published in The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 1/20/2008]

At 12:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, with temperatures well below freezing, most of the people navigating the icy sidewalks of Mankato’s downtown entertain­ment district were moving quickly.

Even though it was cold enough to see their breath on this December night, many of the 20­-somethings bouncing from bar to bar were without coats. Some, often with hands stuffed deep into their pants pockets as they shuffled along, were in short-sleeved shirts.

Three women in one group were stumbling as they walked, holding on to the shoulders of two men propped between them. They had no problem getting past a bar bouncer and into one bar even though two of the women seemed unable to find their identification cards without help from their friends. They spoke with slurred words as the bouncer slid their driver’s licenses through an electronic gizmo before allow­ing them inside.

Once inside the bar, they joined others who were there to drink, many of them throughout the night.

This was during a quiet, cold night downtown. On a warmer Thursday, Friday or Saturday young adults can be seen stumbling to Jackson Square Park after midnight, finding a place under a tree and forcing themselves to vomit. Then, they return to one of the nearby bars.

It’s a late-night atmosphere that prompted city officials to demand bars change the way they do business, ending drink specials the city says encourage binge drinking.

It’s also the place where Amanda Jax spent her last night drinking and celebrat­ing her 21st birthday Oct. 30. A police investigation showed Jax had downed enough liquor to crank her blood-alcohol concentration up to a deadly .46 percent, before taking her last breath in a friend’s apartment.

Witnesses told police Jax passed out at Sidelines Bar and Grill, one of several downtown bars that has received city sanctions for violating liquor license rules. In about two hours of drink­ing, she’d consumed a shot of whiskey, a shot of rum, at least a couple of beers and a portion of a pitcher of Long Island ice tea, police reports said. She had started drink­ing a multiple-shot vodka and schnapps drink before slump­ing over on a bar stool, police reported.

Three weeks after Jax died, 22-year-old Rissa Amen-Reif was hit by a car and killed while in the middle of a dark road on the north edge of Mankato.

Investigators have not released all the details of the Nov. 18 incident but have said alcohol was a factor and the 17-year-old boy who was driving the car that hit her showed no signs of intoxica­tion after the crash.

Amen-Reif and a friend had wandered to the secluded area after attending a Minnesota State University sorority event at the Morson­-Ario VFW on Riverfront Drive, which is more than a mile away. Investigators were told the women thought they were walking toward down­town, which was in the oppo­site direction.

Just last weekend, North Mankato police indicated the death of 22-year-old Tony Lee Miller likely was alcohol relat­ed. The body of Miller, a paraplegic, was discovered in his apartment Jan. 13. He was a graduate of South Central College.

The tragic deaths of the MSU students were common knowledge to three MSU sen­iors smoking outside Blue Bricks on this December night. Derek Cumm, Matt Anderson and Nate Olson were enjoying a few drinks with friends after wrapping up another semester of finals. They were candid about their perceptions of college students and other young adults who drink. They don’t believe statistics showing 21 percent of MSU students con­sume alcohol more than one day each week. They also don’t believe 13 percent of students drink only once each week, 30 percent drink less than once a week and 36 per­cent of students don’t drink at all.

Those statistics come from student surveys and students don’t always tell the truth on the questionnaires, even though they’re done anony­mously, they said.

“It’s a survey,” Olson said.

“I lie on surveys.”

All three said they had their first alcoholic drink when they were freshmen in high school, or about 15 years old. That fits with reports from police and college administrators, who say many of the students who do drink alcohol when they first arrive on campus already are experi­enced drinkers. When asked how many drinks were too many during one night of partying, Cumm, Anderson and Olson said it’s definitely time to stop when you hit “double digits.”

“As soon as you cross that nine or 10 level, it’s too much,” Olson said.

“It seems like, now, it’s completely acceptable to get tanked,” Anderson said. “I think you should definitely learn your limits before you go to college. Then what hap­pened to those girls (Jax and Amen-Reif) wouldn’t hap­pen.”

All three of the men said Jax had to have been an inex­perienced drinker to hit the blood-alcohol concentration level she did.

Experts, such as Sharon Rhoades of the Brown County Evaluation Center, say that isn’t true. Someone has to be a very experienced drinker with a high tolerance for alcohol to reach anything close to .46 BAC without vomiting or passing out first, Rhoades said. Most people are in need of constant atten­tion at a detoxification center if their BAC is half that, she said.

Detox staff and others, including Mankato police offi­cers, have noted a trend of rising BAC levels among young people who are arrest­ed and sent to detox. What was once uncommon, levels hitting the .25 mark and above, are now a regular occurrence.

What seems to be happen­ing with young people and alcohol now isn’t anything new to two other MSU stu­dents who have “been there and done that.” Joe Petersen, 53, and Phillip Buzzard, 45, are both recovering alcoholics and non-traditional students enrolled in the university’s Drug and Alcohol Studies program.

This is Petersen’s fourth try at being a college student. He was a student at Michigan State from 1973 to 1975 and Bemidji State from 1975 to 1976 before he decided to take time off. Petersen then became a “ vegetarian non­drinker” while he tended bar and took classes at Washington State from 1977 to 1979.

“When I was in college, the drinking age went from 21 to 18 on June 1, 1973, because of the Vietnam War,” Petersen said. “ We used to have keg­gers on our dorm floor every weekend. There was lots of binge drinking going on all the time right on campus. I was a straight-A student, then my grades were going down­hill because I was partying all the time.

“We’d get a keg and sit around and drink it until it was gone. If we ran out of beer and could still walk, we’d probably go to a bar and drink a few pitchers between three or four of us. You drank until you were absolutely sloshed.”

Back then, Petersen said he had a perception everyone drank. He said he realizes now it’s actually a small per­centage of people who are binge drinking, but those peo­ple get the most attention because “they do the stupid things.” Everyone remembers the guy who gets “ ham­mered” at parties, but no one remembers all of the other people walking around with a beer but not drunk.

"I don’t think that’s ever going to change,” Petersen said. “Children are children until they’re adults. Some of it is learned behavior, passed on from generation to genera­tion. It’s a social problem as well as an individual problem. Billions of dollars are spent in the liquor industry. It’s all about the money. It’s all about making the buck.”

After the deaths of Jax and Amen-Reif, MSU made an expensive decision to cut alcohol promotions from ath­letic events. The university also offers numerous health classes to teach the dangers of high-risk drinking and pro­vides entertainment options to students who don’t want to go to the bars or drinking parties. So university officials are doing what they can, Petersen said.

Buzzard disagrees. He said the university should do more to hold students responsible for their behavior both on and off campus. He has chil­dren who are 19 and 20 and doesn’t think college students that age have the ability to make “ true adult decisions.”

University officials recently said they’re willing to consid­er sanctioning students cited for drinking and using drugs off campus, and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System is pursu­ing changes in state law that would allow universities to notify parents about those types of incidents on and off campus.

Just last week, state Rep. Morrie Lanning of Moorhead said he plans to introduce a bill at the Legislature that would end all-you-can-drink and ladies-drink-for-free bar specials throughout the state.

Buzzard said he thinks the university needs to be more aggressive. “I’m really disap­pointed, and it bothers me quite a bit. I see these deaths as needless. I’m an observer and I sit and listen to people.

"I hear about parties of under­age kids and it scares me.

“The campus is running amok, and I don’t see any­body taking responsibility for the drinking. You hear people running the campus saying they’re doing good and fol­lowing procedures. You can say that, but, if you don’t put anything behind it, it’s just lip service. A college is like a club, and they can make poli­cies that could limit a lot of this stuff.”

Buzzard’s comments came before the university hosted a campuswide summit on high­-risk drinking in December.

That summit, which was closed to the public, resulted in the university considering on- campus sanctions for stu­dents cited for alcohol viola­tions off campus. A communi­tywide summit is to take place sometime in February.

Students already face a sanction process if they are caught drinking, or get into trouble for an alcohol-related incident, in the dorms or else­where on campus, said Wendy Schuh, MSU assistant director of student health services. She also said studies have shown that most college students who drink are learn­ing to drink while they’re still in high school.

So the university tries to change inaccurate perceptions about how often and how much college students drink (surveys show students think their classmates drink much more than they really do) and provide as much information as possible about the dangers of high-risk drinking.

“It makes it hard for us to just say don’t drink because they’re already familiar with alcohol use,” she said. “So we don’t go from an abstinence approach. Our goal is to change the perceptions about drinking in college, change the norm. But that’s a hard task.”

Both Petersen and Buzzard said they have learned through their classes that the problems Mankato is facing with alcohol and young peo­ple are the same as the prob­lems being faced by cities across the U.S. They agree parents could be doing more to educate their children about the positive and nega­tive aspects of alcohol before they ever take that first drink. They also agree society needs to do more to teach young people about the dangers of drinking too much.

“Any education begins at home when kids are younger,” Petersen said.

“Television ads are showing a standard that says drinking is fun and you need to drink to be accepted. You never see ads saying you’re a wonderful person if you don’t buy this product. By the time they get to college, it’s ingrained.”

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